Carmen Callil followed her mother's advice and didn't learn shorthand; instead, she started Virago Press, publishing "books which celebrated women and women's lives" and changing the way the world thought of women writers. In thisLRB interviewwith Rosemary Hill, she talks about her love for the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, her disillusionment with the current world, her anger at Brexit and at the way government shafts the poor. She's a great person to listen to, sharp and opinionated ; she and Hill have a real conversation. 48 min.

Thanks to the BBC, I’ve become very fond of three Classicist feminists from the UK: Natalie Haynes, Mary Beard, and Edith Hall. And now, add Catherine Nixey, whose The Darkening Age has just been published. This is from Macmillan’s blurb: “Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyr's deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed”

A terrific and lively discussion between Nixey and Edith Hall is here, at the BBC History magazine site:

In her interview on researching and writing her piece about the kid who killed nine people at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah talks about education and the lack of it:

"There's a complete lack of personal responsibility. You're like, you're worried about black people and Mexican people and all these people because you don't take personal responsibility for yourself. My great-grandmother went to college. She went to college one generation out of chattel slavery, okay? Dylan Roof and his dad did not go to school, they did not do their work. They're not invested in this country. Their only sense of belonging, the only right they should have to feel the way they do is because they believe their whiteness means something."

There has been lots and lots (and lots) of punditry (good and bad) about the Trump nightmare, but Maureen Dowd has more fun with it than anyone I've read lately, and her opinion piece in the Times is worth a read. Click on the quote for the link.

French journalist Nicholas Hénin was held hostage by Isis for ten months. His reasons for not bombing Syria are well worth reading. Here are a couple of quotes from a piece in The Guardian.

“Strikes on Isis are a trap. The winner of this war will not be the parties that have the newest, most expensive, most sophisticated weaponry, but the party that manages to have the people on its side... At the moment, with the bombings, we are more likely pushing the people into the hands of Isis. What we have to do, and this is really key, we have to engage the local people. As soon as the people have hope in the political solution, then Islamic State will just collapse. It will have no ground any more. It will collapse.”

Hénin can also be found onThe Syrian Campaign, home site for a non profit based in the UK, and well worth checking out.

Two weeks after the election, and I’ve yet to encounter a soul who is not feeling so profoundly better that “better” scarcely applies; we are citizens again, we have regained our country, and no longer feel abandoned in Mordor.

We know that the new regime will disappoint and dismay us, but we also know that they will not treat us as their enemy. It has been a misery to live for as long as we have in a country run by people who treat us like (a) fools, and (b) shit.

And the socially awkward man in a blue suit, the man with the fabled temper that made his minions tremble, the man who decimated the civil service, who did not believe that government policy should be based on science or fact; he who promoted Yes men who made themselves vanity videos, he who got his own way with the press of this nation time and again in ways that became increasingly embarrassing, he who did much to ruin whatever credibility we may have had outside the country as a people not previously pegged as selfish, venal and stupid—our former leader, what do most of us make of him now? He seems to be no bigger than this:

Niall Ferguson was on BBC's Start the Week doing a promo of his (authorized) bio of Kissinger (volume one) when he ganged up with Gabriel Gorodetsky to tell Jane Smiley that what historians do is so much more important than what she does. He drips with so much condescension that the episode becomes cringe making. Novelists make things up, he says while historians have to stick to what's true; he presents a picture in which history is, somehow, the more pure. The fact that a historian might approach a subject with his own agenda doesn't seem to occur to him. (Presumably, it did occur to Henry Kissinger.) Andrew Marr is the host who lets things get out of control. It's worth listening to because Smiley gets her back up and puts Ferguson in his place; she's mad as hell and pretty terrific.

Sixteen years ago, Savoie wrote on the the concentration of power in Canadian politics (LINK); the Duffy trial strengthens his thesis.

"...governing from the centre has created a fault line in the government where things that matter to the prime minister and his immediate advisers are brought above the line and dealt with quickly and effectively. Only the prime minister and his advisers will decide what belongs above the fault line. It can be anything from a decision to go to war while not consulting the relevant ministers – let alone the cabinet – down to a $90,000 problem considered sufficiently important to generate 450+ pages of e-mails. Under these circumstances, why would anyone other than a career politician want to run for Parliament?"

Sean Fine is the justice writer at the Globe and Mail and an invaluable resource when looking at how the federal government has been implementing its tough on crime agenda. There was a major piece in Friday's Globe on the appointment of judges:

A reporter for BC's Infonews.ca has very calmly and politely expressed the exasperation that accompanies the PM's public appearances, that is to say his photo ops. The Man Who Will Not Answer A Question was attempting to use a forest fire to his advantage.

"I would argue we have very little credibility within NATO. Of course, our friends in NATO aren't going to say that publicly, but the people within NATO who are relevant to our discussion, they know about Canadian military capabilities. They know about what we could and could not do and they know our posturing is utterly vacuous."

The former top prosecutor for north-west England writes in The Guardian, "There are 13 Muslim MPs, including eight women, but they do not speak for the faith, rather for their constituents. Imams, with a few excellent exceptions, don’t see their role as anything more than prayer and looking after a building, the mosque – the imam of Dibley is not so different from the vicar in that respect."

One could call Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney's remarks about the Voices-Voix report laughable (he sounds like a cartoon politician in an old Preston Sturges movie), if they weren't deeply saddening and an indication of what an appalling nation we have become.

“Why are the NDP, Mr. Speaker, and the Liberals siding along with terrorist organizations?”

It's nearly impossible to not mutter obscenities every time this sort of I-am-appalled hypocrisy gets said and minions leap to their feet and applaud.

"It seems unlikely that history will record this as the end of “the MacKay era.” It is difficult to speak of a MacKay legacy, or MacKayism, at least with a straight face. Indeed, it is difficult to recall much about him even now. Though not gone, he is forgotten. We shall look upon his like again."